Bug#667573: x264: 10 bit builds

[Reinhard Tartler]

tags 667573 upstream
forwarded 667573 x264-devel at videolan.org
severity 667573 wishlist
stop

Dear x264 developers,

The following quote is taken from a debian bug report that has been
filed against the debian x264 package. The full buglog can be read at
http://bugs.debian.org/667573

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 2:55 AM, Jonathan Rosser
<jonathan.rosser at rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:
> It would be really good to get a proper solution to this. I currently
> require 8 bit and 10bit of x264 to be available to the same application
> at the same time.
>
> A typical use case would be simultaneously encoding 10bit 4:2:2 and 8
> bit 4:2:0 versions of the same source video, this cannot be achieved
> with linkage to a single x264 library.
>
> [Alternatively an application that can encode in either 8 or 10 bit
> modes is equally difficult to write]
>
> I have resorted to building my own custom .deb for the 10 bit version
> which installs to /usr/x264-10bit/... then a plug-in architecture and
> dlopen() allow one executable to dynamically link against both the 8 and
> 10bit versions and keep both sets of symbols isolated from each other.
>
> This is all fairly hohrrible, but works....
>
> I don't see the 8 or 10 bit versions as been "alternatives" (overloaded
> terminology, sorry!), I need them to be able to co-exist.
>
> Anyway, just some input to help define what might be useful for a 10bit
> x264 package.

Thanks for your bug report.

Unfortunately, I don't see a good way how we can provide this
functionality cleanly in Debian without the help of upstream. I
understand that the 10bit implementation uses a lot of CPP magic to
reuse a lot of code, but to me the sanest solution to this problem
seems to me to compile twice. Is there any way to make the libx264.so
library provide both 8bit and 10bit encoding?

Jonathan, until tihs is resolved, I would suggest you to compiled x264
as  static library and link your applications against that build.
Inconvenient, but I don't see a better solution right now.


-- 
regards,
    Reinhard